January 11, 2004

BY MIKE HOULIHAN

Zeus has been known to play favorites. It happened at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Bill Mulliken was a 21-year-old kid from Champaign swimming the 200-meter breaststroke. In the next lane was Japanese champion Yoshihiko Osaki.

Bill says, "We all kind of assumed that Osaki was going to rule the day. Coming off the third turn, headed home, I realized I could not only beat the guy but I could probably break the world record. I had what they call a "zone swim." You know how athletes will tell you, 'I was in the zone?' In the Olympics it's called 'the light of Zeus.'

"The ancient games were all about Zeus. The god Zeus would sit on Olympus and if he liked a guy like me he'd throw a little bolt of lightning down and give you that extra go."

Irving Park **Early histories indicate that present-day Milwaukee Avenue and Irving Park Road were old Indian trails. **Montrose, Garyland and Irving Park each developed around railroad stations. **The earliest settlement, located near the present-day crossing of Irving Park Road and the Chicago & North Western Rwy., originated on the site of a farm purchased by the Race family in 1869. **Named after Washington Irving, the village was originally called Irvington but was renamed Irving Park. **The advantages of transportation and good drainage drew settlers to the area, especially after the Chicago Fire of 1871. **By 1875, Irving Park, with its 60 homes, was considered a very fashionable suburb. **Irving Park's original settlers were English, Germans and Swedes. **Irving Park became part of the City of Chicago in 1889 when the township of Jefferson was annexed by election. **The years between 1900 and 1920 saw the development of Irving Park's present residential form. **By 1940, land use in Irving Park was 87 percent residential, 10 percent commercial or business and 2 percent industrial. Source: The Chicago Fact Book

That bolt of lightning hit Bill again 20 years later at 2 a.m. on the corner of Rush and Division when he met his wife, Lorna. She tells me, "Bill had dropped off his date and I was still waiting to get lucky."

Ol' Zeus knew what he was doing 'cause Bill's the one who got lucky meeting this lovely gamine. Lorna and Bill have been married 22 years and live in Old Irving. He introduced her to other friends of Zeus. "When I first met him we went to a party with 28 people, 23 of them had Olympic medals."

Mulliken won his Olympic gold medal two days after his 21st birthday. That's a rite of passage usually sung to "100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall," but Bill was in training. He didn't mind. "Think of it as a kid, to have all your best friends come over to your house for your birthday, play your favorite game, and you win. I had 4,000 of the best athletes in the world; they all came together for my birthday. I got to do my favorite event and I win. It was pretty unbelievable."

The Russians had just launched Sputnik in the space race and the Iron Curtain was slammed shut. Bill says, "Every time we got done with practice, the Russian swimming team would be there and they had these guys who looked like they were KGB. They had long coats on in the middle of summer, looked like something out of a B-movie.

"My dad had made this comment to me, 'It really would be good if you could beat one Russian.' I grew up in that kind of environment, ya know -- 'dirty commie bastards!' It was Cold War."

The Russians had three breaststrokers in the Olympics that year, but Georgiy Prokopenko was their champion. Bill Mulliken was the 17th seed, definitely not the favorite.

Bill says, "So I got Prokopenko in the first heat, he's right next to me. I figure this guy's gotta be a hotshot, so I'll just race him. So I'm swimmin' along ... about 125 meters into this thing I'm riding right on his chest. He's definitely ahead of me, and I'm thinkin', 'I can take him.' So I just put the throttle down just a little bit more and I did."

The kid from Champaign set an Olympic record that day and brought a gold medal back to the U.S.A. He tells me tales of the "ready room" before the events --Prokopenko singing the national anthem with the Polish guy, trash talk with the Japanese, and pysch-out head games with the Australians. It's the swimmers' version of "Chariots of Fire."

Forty-four years later and Bill Mulliken still talks to those teammates and challengers. He recently tracked down the Dutch guy who won the bronze medal to share some laughs and memories. "I still see Osaki occasionally. He's head of masters [swimming] in Japan."

There are those who call Congress the most elite private club in the world, but they can't touch the Olympians. Bill says, "You become part of an incredibly small group. You've got this common denominator. The one thing you know about everybody who makes an Olympic team is, they worked their butts off, they found something they were good at and they pursued it and they put it on the line. It's a lot of fun."

Does Lorna get sick of hearing the stories?

"He doesn't tell it the same way every time," she says.

Bill shares the fruits of victory with his wife, who says, "It really is fun. I've met Muhammad Ali. Bill reintroduced himself to him and told him they were on the same Olympic team. Ali asked him what his event was. Bill said, 'Swimming.' Ali said, 'I was in boxing.' Bill started laughing and Ali started to throw some punches at him and Bill said, 'I'll take you in the pool.' and Ali said, 'No swimming!' "

They show me the medal. Lorna says, "He used to keep it in his sock drawer." I hold it in my hand, knowing this is as close as I'll ever get to having one, unless they open up pocket pool competition.

Whose picture is on the medal? He says, "Nike." Those commercial bastards get in on everything. "No, no, Nike is the goddess of athletics." Oh.

The Olympic gold medal originally came with a chain of laurel leaves, but Bill took the links and had them made into jewelry for the important people in his life: his mom, his coach, his kids and Lorna.

Bill and Lorna swim together every morning at the Chicago Athletic Club. He plans on retiring this summer after a career as a corporate lawyer. Lorna is the associate conservator of textiles at the Art Institute of Chicago. Bill says one defining moment of his life was making that third turn in the semifinals in Rome, when he was hit with the light of Zeus.

The other had to be Cupid's arrow that morning at Division and Rush.